Scrapbook history and modern use

Scrapbook history and modern use

Preserving personal and family history in the form of a notebook is termed as scrapbooking. Mostly it is composed of clippings from newspapers, photographs, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and extensively contain thorough journaling. Scrapbooking is a widely practiced pastime all over the world in different format & names. For example in UK during 15th century Commonplace books were very popular to compile information that comprised of recipes, popular quotations, personal letters, poems and much more. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s personal interests. Later on in 16th century Friendship albums became popular. These albums were like modern time yearbooks, where friends or patrons would enter their names, titles and short texts or illustrations at the request of the album’s owner. Later on colored plates were used for depicting carnivals and fashion shows. Later on an English woman Anne Wagner incorporated decoupage technique during 18th century in her scrapbook of ‘Memorial of friendship’. She was in the social circle of famous English poet Percy Byshe Shelley. However, in 20th century a lady from Utah, named Marielen Christensen turned an ancient craft into Business. She displayed her work in a conference on records in Salt Lake City and later on she and her husband published a how-to book on scrapbook keeping and also opened a store in 1981 relating to scrapbooking.

Scrapbook Media

Now-a-days two main media are in use, paper and digital. In paper some time photo albums are also used. Recently, smaller albums are very popular. Various accessories refer to as embellishments are used to decorate the album leaf to attain a certain effect in regard to the topic covered. On the other hand in digital scrapbooking tools like scanners, MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe flash software packages are in use to achieve a perfect look or feel. Hoards of software tools for publishing digital scrapbook(s) online available and has an ease of use and it also cut down on supplies like paper and embellishments. All these software packages have plethora of backgrounds, text styles, font size and boxes. The dedicated websites for digital scrapbook are Serif.com, Stampinup.com, Mymemories.com, Scrapbookflair.com, Wondershare.com, Smilebox.com, Photomix.com, Scrapbookmax.com, Softonic.com, Brighthub.com, Memorymixer.com, Funtimescrapbooking.com, Pixelscraper.com, Freedigitalscrapbooking.com and many more

Modern Use

For some it is still a record book for holding recipes or memories of an event they like to adhere to but others are using this craft for genealogy with a greater passion.